Cappella Sansevero

Interesting facts

The Veiled Christ was first entrusted to Antonio Corradini, but he died in 1752 leaving only a terracotta model, and Giuseppe Sanmartino largely set that design aside.

Raimondo di Sangro planned to place the Veiled Christ in an underground crypt lit by everlasting lamps of his own invention, though it was probably never moved there.

According to legend, part of the garden wall collapsed before a wrongly arrested man, revealing a painting of the Pietà, and he was soon proved innocent.

One recent theory links the chapel's founding to the 1590 murder of Fabrizio Carafa by the composer Carlo Gesualdo, Carafa's mother being married into the Sangro family.

Ten allegorical Virtues line the walls: nine honour wives of the Sangro princes, while Disillusion is dedicated to Raimondo's father.

Raimondo made some of the materials himself, including the mastic of the cornice and the paints of the ceiling fresco, whose colours remain unusually bright.

The statue of Decorum shows a youth wearing two different shoes, a high buskin on one foot and a simple clog on the other.

Above the entrance, the monument to Cecco de' Sangro shows an armed warrior bursting out of his coffin.

A raised passage once connected the chapel to the family palace across the lane; it collapsed in the late 1880s, taking the original labyrinth floor with it.

One of the two anatomical models is a pregnant woman, and rumour long claimed the bodies had been injected while the subjects were still alive.

Why it is worth it

Hidden in a narrow street of Naples' historic centre, the Cappella Sansevero holds one of the most astonishing sculptures of the 18th century: the Veiled Christ, carved by Giuseppe Sanmartino in 1753. The dead Christ lies on a cushioned bed under a shroud so fine that the face, the wounds and the ribs show through the cloth, yet the body and the veil are cut from a single block of marble. The illusion is so complete that a legend grew up around it: some claimed that the prince who commissioned it had turned a real veil into stone by some secret alchemical process.

The chapel's origins go back to 1590, when Giovan Francesco di Sangro founded it after recovering from an illness, and in 1613 Alessandro di Sangro turned it into the burial chapel of the family. Its present appearance is due to Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of Sansevero, a scientist, inventor and freemason, who in the mid-18th century rebuilt and redecorated it as a single, coherent programme full of symbolic meaning. Around the walls stand marble allegories of virtue dedicated to members of his family. Two of them rival the Veiled Christ: Modesty (Pudicizia), by Antonio Corradini, 1752, a woman wrapped in a transparent veil, dedicated to the prince's mother; and Disillusion (Il Disinganno), by Francesco Queirolo, 1753–54, a man struggling free from a net carved in marble with almost unbelievable openness, dedicated to his father. Above, the vault is covered by Francesco Maria Russo's fresco Glory of Paradise, painted in 1749, and the original floor was laid out as a black-and-white labyrinth, a Masonic symbol of initiation.

In the crypt below are two of the chapel's strangest exhibits, the so-called anatomical machines commissioned by Raimondo di Sangro around 1760: the skeletons of a man and a woman with their arteries and veins reconstructed in beeswax, iron wire and silk. The chapel stands in the heart of old Naples, the city founded by Greek colonists that grew into one of the great capitals of baroque Europe, and its historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Getting there

The Cappella Sansevero stands on Via Francesco de Sanctis in the historic centre of Naples, just northeast of the church of San Domenico Maggiore. The nearest airport is Naples International Airport (NAP), about 5 km away. Dante station on metro Line 1 is a short walk away.

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From the encyclopaedia

The Cappella Sansevero is a chapel located on Via Francesco de Sanctis 19, just northeast of the church of San Domenico Maggiore, in the historic center of Naples, Italy. The chapel is more properly named the Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà. It contains works of Rococo art by some of the leading Italian artists of the 18th century.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia